New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

We in Rural Milton just got a community newsletter from our town counselor in which it was mentioned that new Rogers Rocket Hub plans for rural customers would soon be offered. For too long we have been hammered with ridiculously expensive data plans and have no option but to bend over and take it. But when this was mentioned it seems to give us hope that we might be getting a price break that will bring us high speed Internet at prices approaching city dwellers. As yet I have not seen any evidence of this happening any time soon.

What is the story here? Is there any news from Rogers yet on this announced policy?

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

Was it a Rogers advertisement or just a note from the local council? If there are new Rocket Hub plans we will update the Community. In the mean time, you can review the Mobile Internet plan options here.

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

Hello RogersZia, thank you for the reply. I will copy the section from the community newsletter article (a weekly newsletter composed and bulk mailed by a city counsellor to residents in the Nassageweya area of Milton) and paste it here:

Rural Internet – I heard through the grapevine that Rogers and possibility Cogeco have significantly lowered their prices for the hub service. This has not been advertised. If you have this feature, it may be worth a call to their Customer Service. (Let me know what happens.)

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

Other posters have indicated that the Flex Heavy plan has been available since July. It would be nice if Rogers were the sort of company that voluntarily told you that money saving options were available. I was just about to switch to Xplornet's 25GB for $74.99/mth. Xplornet upload is faster, download is about 1/3 of Rogers, but the savings (I've been paying Rogers $126/mth for the last 5-6 months) may make it worth a try.

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

Fido and Virgin coverage maps both indicate service in my area (the Fido map is identical to Rogers, same colour scheme and everything), but when I called they both said it isn't availble in my area (I contacted Bell well over a month ago and was told there is no service). I suspect there may be a non competition agreement between companies (or a corporate strangle hold, whichever).

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

Thanks for the information on the new Telus plans, markymarkl. In BC Telus had by far the worst Flex Hub Plan with Bell 2nd worst. The plans you mention are not apparent unless one uses the "5" link you provided. Telus and Rogers have their radios on the same Vernon BC hotel roof which feeds me 30 km away.

If I enter my address or any other nearby address the Telus site says it cannot determine if it can serve me. But it provides a link for a self-test to see if you can receive LTE in your location. The Telus LTE map does show service is available for me, which I would expect since I get great service from Rogers from the same location.

I am very happy with Rogers service and will do some more checking to see if they are altering their plans. Perhaps some of this was setup in advance with the providers having a good idea about last week's CRTC ruling calling for more options for rural customers.

I intend to call or write to Rogers to see if they are altering their plans. I also need to research Telus more to make sure they have a good 700 MHz LTE installation at the site serving me. I need 700 MHz due to the distance and trees.

One concern with the cellular high monthly GB offerings is that it may saturate some installations and speed could suffer. My download speed averages around 15 Mbps now but that is not super important. We set Netflix and YouTube on fairly low quality settings to limit our monthly data under 50 GB. But with higher data allowances, we would be tempted to raise the picture quality and could contribute to slowing down the system.

I like the Rogers service and will do all I can to stay with it.

I thought the ZTE MF725R Smart Hub might be a "typo" error for the present ZTE MF275R. But no, it is a different hub. I could not find a manual for the MF725R. It looks similar to the MF275R. I need my hub to have ethernet ports and external antenna connectors.

It is encouraging to see a higher GB/month offering at a good price. Hopefully, Rogers will come up with a similar solution.

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

I like Roger so far as well except for billing me 60.00 bucks for 1 day of service! But they sort of fixed that. I have sent emails to Rogers management and I quote thier answer below.

"The reason that wireless Internet rates are more expensive is due to the availability of space: wireless bandwidth is much more limited at this time than cable bandwidth, so access to it comes at a premium rate. No one is able to offer wireless Internet at the same rates as hard-wired."

"Thank you for forwarding that information. Please keep in mind that Telus has a very robust wireless network out west, and the population is much smaller than it is here in southern Ontario. This is why it's only available in AB and BC right now. As our LTE coverage expands and we are able to support more bandwidth on our network, I'm sure that prices will come down on our end as well."

Re: New affordable Rocket Hub plan?

I dont know why they advertise the super fast speeds if they dont have the capacity to handle it? Why up your speed and spend all that cash on a system that cant handle the traffic. A local tech siad to me we have 3 towers within 7 kms of my house we should glow at night LOL. And there is tons of capacity and all of the big guys are taking advantage of underserviced areas! So until one of them comes up with an affordable plan we in the country will continue to see extremly high interent rates.